The naming of names

I've had it in my mind to do something like this for a while. I love the old botanists and plant hunters with their slightly manic (slightly, did I say?) missions of great hardship and danger, all to fill our books and flowerbeds with neatly classified families of plants.

Often members of the Royal Society, they produced plant illustrations that are incredibly beautiful and totally scientific in the way the flowers, leaves and seedpods are meticulously drawn to scale and laid out side by side.

And then there's the man whose drawing you see here, the Rev William Keble Martin, whose brilliant Concise British Flora in Colour was published 1965 when he was 88. I don't have a copy, but years ago I did pick up secondhand his Sketches for.. and it's the line drawing of the Allium triquetrum - which he called Triangular-stalked Garlic and which I know as Three-cornered Leek - that you see here, because it happens to grow abundantly in a wild corner of my mum's garden! I don't tell her that - she doesn't like wild things growing where they're not meant to!

I'd like to develop this idea further - setting the real 3D (colour) object, shadows and all, against the 2D (in this case black and white) drawing - and then, of course, putting the whole thing back into 2D via the camera. I think on gale-ridden days when I'm not going out getting blown to pieces and falling in rivers, I might try for a series and see how far I can push it. Tell me if you get bored!